[nimh]

XPpro, ntfs, 80g IDE wd's 8m x2, ITE giga-byte onboard ata133 raid.
Setup as bootable Stripe. both disks are master, on separate channels. latest drivers, right cables.
Imaged o/s install with ghost using an old 40g 5400(didnt have cash to buy two drives at once) 80g >image on to 40>build raid with 2 80's>initilize disk in xp>image off 40g onto raid>set raid to boot.
It all seems fine i have my single 149g "ITE disk array 0 SCSI disk device" in device manager.
but when i did a file system benchmark in Sandra 2003 i get slower than used to get with my single 80g.
hd tach reports 15ms access, 35 mb/sec sequential read.
have i forgotten to check some type of DMA setting?
ive looked and other people have had my prob on other setups but all using xp. no answers though.
thanks for any help!

 

[johnwill]

I'll just hazard a guess that the quality of the RAID controller has a lot to do with it. In addition, since you don't have spindle-sync with IDE drives, striped reads aren't as fast as with SCSI.

IMO, RAID isn't worth fooling around with unless you're going to have a real RAID controller and at least 4 drives in a RAID5 array.

 

[Guest]

nimh Please do not double post! Your not going to get twice as much help.........

One thread per issue is quite sufficient.................Thank You....:winkgrin:

 

[nimh]

sorry speedo,
dang, i was expecting not as fast as a promise or good brand but slower than single?! (i should have bought a single 120)
somethings not right..

 

[Rhall75]

It was my understanding that anytime you setup a raid whether it be a 0 or 5 it will decrease the performance of a system. With that said I have only setup Raid 5. To me it makes sence that it is slower because it is haveing to act as if two drives are 1 which is an extra process it has to go through.

 

[johnwill]

Actually, RAID-5 with at least 4 drives is significantly faster than a single drive. I've setup a few servers with RAID-5 arrays, and the disk speed is very pleasing.

 

[Rhall75]

Hmmm, then I need to figure out why the servers I have setup in the past have decrease a slight bit in speed. I know that when a disk goes bad the system performance noticeably decreases, But I seem to always notice a little bit of a decrease in speed when I setup a RAID 5. Maybe it is my head because others said expect a bit of decrease in speed.

 

[Guest]

I tried RAID 0 a couple of years ago an ABIT KT7-A Raid motherboard and thought there was a pretty substantial increase in speed.

 

[Rhall75]

See I learn something new everyday!

 

[johnwill]

Hmmm, then I need to figure out why the servers I have setup in the past have decrease a slight bit in speed. I know that when a disk goes bad the system performance noticeably decreases, But I seem to always notice a little bit of a decrease in speed when I setup a RAID 5. Maybe it is my head because others said expect a bit of decrease in speed.

Man, if you don't see an increase in speed with a multi-drive RAID-5 array, you're doing something VERY wrong! With four drives, I see over double the throughput of a single drive, and with five drives, it was almost three times the raw transfer rate of the single drive. The most recent one I worked on was a Compact Proliant server, that's the one I remember doing the speed tests on. We had one 7200 RPM drive on a separate channel for an internal backup, and the RAID array.